Drop the beat: The Ultimate Smartphone Guide, part III

Music lovers, this one's for you: here are the best ways to get your jam on.

Streaming your tunes

Streaming services generally take a different tack than music stores. Rather than offering individual tracks or whole albums for purchase and giving you digital files to download, streaming services send songs directly to you, often for free. On the upside, there's nothing to download and sometimes not even anything to buy; on the downside, there's often less flexibility about what you can listen to and how you can listen to it. Streaming is growing massively in popularity as home and mobile Internet connections get faster, and we're trending toward a time when you won't need to carry any music with you at all.

Spotify

Spotify is one of the biggest and most popular music streaming services available, going places that Rhapsody and Kazaa users circa 2003 could only have dreamed of. The catalog is millions of songs strong, and new music is added every day. Monumentally, the company recently secured Metallica's permission to include its music collection on the service.

The menu in Android's Spotify app.

The What's New screen in iOS's Spotify app.

Spotify is planning to release updates to its desktop and mobile apps in the coming weeks; as it is, both incarnations are serviceable, if not exactly beautiful. You can put together playlists or queue up songs to stream on the fly within either the iOS or Android app. A Windows Phone 8 app is also set for release in the coming weeks, but no concrete dates have been announced yet.

Spotify's desktop version is free with ads, but to use the mobile app, users must pay $10 per month.

Rdio

Rdio provides the same service as Spotify, but its app has been updated more recently, so it's a little more robust and stylish, at least on some of the platforms. The app threads your own local music collection on your computer in with anything you've selected from Rdio's catalog, and it's all available to play or stream from the same place. Like Spotify, you can make playlists and queue songs, and you can even add whole albums to your queue for later (we recently did an extensive comparison of the two services' features).

The Android incarnation of Rdio's app...

...and the iOS incarnation look virtually identical.

Rdio on Windows Phone, however, conforms to the platform's style cues.

Rdio is available on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, though the Windows Phone 8 version's design pales in comparison to the OS's native music apps. Even though we're not fans of the way it displays text sometimes, the Windows Phone music app has much more visual depth (for instance, it displays a shadowy version of the album art for the music currently playing as the backdrop). The Rdio app also seems a bit poky, compared even to the occasional choppiness we see when trying to stream music within the stock music app. The quad-core Snapdragon inside the Optimus G handles the app and streaming better than its dual-core counterpart in the HTC 8X.

Rdio has a limited free tier, but for unlimited use and access to the mobile app, users have to pay $10 a month.

Pandora

Pandora is one of the earliest popular music streaming services, and it's still humming along quite nicely despite the rising popularity of Spotify and Rdio and the specter of mandatory licensing fees.

Pandora allows you to create "stations" based on a particular artist or song, and then streams songs that have similar qualities to that artist or song. You refine the station by giving songs a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down," letting Pandora know that you agree or disagree with its choices. Pandora also offers a number of genre-based stations as well.

Enlarge/ This Pandora station (iOS) based on the early-'90s NYHC band Gorilla Biscuits plays all the hits.

You can listen for free if you don't mind frequent interruptions for ads, as well as incessant pop-up ads in Pandora's mobile apps and constant nags to pay for a subscription to Pandora One. But paying the fee gets rid of all the ads, so many fans might find the $3.99 per month a worthy investment. (Don't be too surprised if that fee increases a bit in the near future, as artists have long argued that streaming music licenses don't pay very well.)

last.fm

Last.fm is a service largely geared toward music discovery. Using its "audio scrobbling" technology, the service tracks what music you listen to and keeps an ongoing record in the cloud. I've used it for several years to track what artists and songs I listen to most often.

Last.fm also has a recommendation engine that points you to other artists you might like. If you like Shelter, you might also like Youth of Today or Bold. If you like Lady Gaga, you might also like Ke$ha or Nicki Minaj, for instance. You can add friends and see how similar your music tastes are, as well as what bands and songs they are into. You can also make recommendations for artists your friends should check out.

The site also keeps a constantly updated database of information about bands, including user submitted photos, bios, and updated touring information. Some bands even offer free MP3s to attract new fans.

Enlarge/ The last.fm app (Windows Phone) will stream songs based on recommendations, artists, genres, or keywords.

In addition to tracking your listening habits and making recommendations, last.fm also offers several streaming options dubbed last.fm "radio." You can stream songs that you already like, songs that last.fm recommends you listen to, or songs liked by other last.fm users with similar tastes (your "neighborhood"). You can also listen to streams based on a particular artist, genre, or keyword.

A last.fm app is available (free) for iOS, Android, and (unlike most services) Windows Phone. A $3 per month subscription gets you access to more features and unlimited, ad-free listening.

MOG

MOG is a music discovery and subscription service that bills itself as a replacement to buying music altogether. With a library of over 16 million songs, MOG claims there is "[n]o more need to buy MP3s, store them on your computer, and sync them to every device."

Enlarge/ MOG's mobile app (iOS) lets you adjust a slider to choose just how similar to the current artist a song has to be to make it on the streaming playlist.

You can stream any song from any artist in MOG's library at full 320kbps quality for free if you don't mind ads. Upgrade to unlimited ad-free listening for $4.99 a month, or pay $9.99 a month to stream to all your mobile devices. You can even download songs for offline listening.

MOG offers the ability to make playlists of your favorite songs, as well as generating "radio" streams based on your favorite artists or listening habits. Unlike other services, MOG shows you the tracks that are upcoming in a stream, allowing you to rearrange them, take them off the list, or insert additional tracks.

Like most streaming services, MOG offers a free app for both iOS and Android.

Rhapsody

To those of us who may have stepped foot in a Best Buy in the early aughts, Rhapsody was less a music service than an agent of harassment by eager cashiers. But the streaming company has held on all these years and now competes on the level of Spotify and Rdio (or is it the other way around?).

Rhapsody's catalog is not lacking in content, and like Spotify and Rdio it has a streaming radio component to its service. The selections in "What's New" and "Staff Picks" are a little uninspired, and Rhapsody lacks the social components that can make using Spotify and Rdio so fun—seeing what friends are listening to, both in aggregate and real time. You can connect your account to Facebook to publish your listening activity, but Rhapsody won't cull and display that information from your friends in a neat interface like Spotify and Rdio can. But if you prefer your streaming services without social integration, this may make it easier to slip under the radar.

A track listing for an album in Rhapsody on Windows Phone.

The menu of options in iOS is similar to what we see in Android and Windows Phone.

Android wins at having the most compelling front page in its Rhapsody app.

One small downside of Rhapsody: you can only have it enabled on one device at a time, while Spotify and Rdio allow up to three devices, not including your computer (all only allow you to use the account on one device at a time, however). To get three-device access, Rhapsody requires that you pay for its Premium Plus tier, at $14.99 a month. Rhapsody has a two-week free trial period, but it costs $10 a month thereafter.

TuneIn Radio

If streaming isn't really your style and you still prefer a radio DJ on the other end of your listening experience, TuneIn Radio may be of service. This app collects the audio streams for hundreds of stations across the US into one convenient place and sorts them by category (classical, rock, talk radio, etc).

The app itself isn't a joy to look at on any of the platforms, and it displays ads along the bottom edge in Android and iOS. TuneIn Radio actually sports the best and most fluid design on Windows Phone 8, which the phone's processor handles with ease.

A selection of TuneIn radio stations on Android.

TuneIn's station display on Windows Phone.

The TuneIn menu on iOS.

TuneIn Radio stands above the other apps in that it does not require signing in with an account or any kind of subscription; you can just download and get listening. The app is free on all three platforms.

Nokia Music

Granted, this app is only available on one platform (Windows Phone) and not even on the phone we highlighted as the best in its category. But it deserves mention for the value it adds to the other major Windows Phone handset, the Nokia Lumia 920.

Nokia maintains a catalog of 20 million songs available for purchase and includes a streaming radio service ("mix radio," as it's called within the app). Premade stations are available for listening, but the app can also create mix stations based on a selection of your favorite artists: choose one, two, or three musical acts, hit play, and you have your own custom fusion of whatever weirdness you can throw at the phone. The Nokia Music app also works with stuff you already own, and it can thread in music from your computer to your "collection" within the app, similar to what Rdio does.

A menu of mix radio stations in Nokia Music.

A listing of music shows in the Gigs section of Nokia Music.

Nokia Music can offer a display of recommended artists based on the one you're currently viewing.

In addition to serving up music, Nokia Music also tracks musical performances within range of where you are on the "gigs" page. The app will display musical acts playing near you, in rough chronological order. Clicking on the event provides you with the names of all the acts playing, the time, and the venue name and address. A "tickets" page will provide you with a link to the website where you can buy passes to the show.

Nokia Music comes installed on every Nokia Lumia phone for free, but it is unavailable on the other two platforms.

Coming up next time...

Windows Phone 8, iOS, and Android all have lots of ways to get music to your ears, but there's still a lot more to the Ultimate Smartphone Guide. We've dealt with entertainment and music, but smartphones are being used for everything these days—including some hardcore gaming action. For our next installment, we'll turn the reins over to Gaming Editor Kyle Orland so he can walk us through the best games on each of our three chosen platforms. Warm up your thumbs and get ready!